COMMENT: Fairfax Delivers Pure NBN Fiction

John Davidson the tech writer over at Fairfax Media claims that Malcolm Turnbull’s NBN hasn’t even been connected to his house yet, and already it has slowed his internet connection and rendered his smart home almost useless.

The facts are that the NBN is not Malcolm Turnbull’s NBN it’s the property of the Federal Government and the people of Australia and it’s being managed and delivered by a totally independent entity that reports to the Federal Government.

Unlike Davidson I did switch to the NBN recently and after a nightmare experience with Telstra, which is what I have become accustomed to when dealing with Telstra customer support, I am getting a significantly improved broadband experience.

I live approximately 2.5 kilometres from my local Exchange on Sydney’s North Shore and right now I am getting blisteringly fast broadband download speeds over Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) copper technology.

Some days I am reaching download speeds of 94Mbs on average and on a bad day 72Mbs.

My upload speeds vary between 37Mbs at the top end to 22Mb my service is delivered via a Frontier Router from Telstra. The cost of my NBN service is only $10 more than I was paying for my prior broadband service.

The NBN service I am now getting is a big improvement on the cable connection I use to have directly with Telstra.

When I did have an initial problem, Telstra tried to blame the NBN but when I used my connections at the NBN, to check what Telstra customer service was claiming it was Telstra that was misleading me about the connection.

Davidson then went on to claim that When Mr Turnbull, as the shadow minister for communications was selling his second-rate version of the NBN to the witless electorate (who were warned it would be terrible, but didn’t seem to care as much as they now do), he didn’t talk much about the upload speeds he was sacrificing in the name of getting elected.

What Davidson didn’t tell his readers which is often the case when issues are being reported in Fairfax Media or on the ABC is that under Labor and the then Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, Australians would have been left with a bill for the NBN that would not have not been commercially appealing to an outside party, it would have left every Australian paying billions for a rolls Royce fibre network decades into the future when in fact most Australians are getting a significant improvement with NBN over what they had in the past.

What Turnbull did was rationalise the cost of investment by delivering an NBN broadband technology over an existing copper cable network that can deliver more than adequate broadband speeds as I found out when I moved to the NBN last month.

I not only run my entertainment and productivity network on the NBN, I also have a Ring’s doorbell installed that delivers a live video stream, in real time, direct to my smartphone.

I am also running live streaming of rooms at my house to a smartphone via the Netgear Arlo Security and camera system. All of it is quick and seamless.

I also run Foxtel and my home phone over the NBN network.

Chris Mitchell writing in the Australian newspaper said “If you think of complaints about NBN speeds recently. Most stories have been informed by the individual journalist’s view that the original fibre-to-the-home scheme proposed by Rudd and Stephen Conroy would have been better. As if money were no object.

But despite the unchallenged and false claim by Conroy on the Bolt Report on Tuesday night that his scheme would have been cheaper, common sense should tell every journalist in the country that rolling out fibre to the node at the end of the street across a whole continent will cost a fraction of what it would have cost to roll out that fibre to every home in the street.

He said that as columnist Terry McCrann noted in the Herald Sun on Thursday morning, the rollout that is now half finished probably would be only 15 per cent done under the Labor “Rolls Royce” NBN.

But why is the government even mandating such technology and why were the industry and the market not left to provide effective solutions?

David Richards has been writing about technology for more than 30 years. A former Fleet Street, Journalist He wrote the Award Winning Series on the Federated Ships Painters + Dockers Union for the Bulletin that led to a Royal Commission. He is also a Logie Winner. for Outstanding Contribution To TV Journalism with a story called The Werribee Affair. In 1997, he built the largest Australian technology media Company and prior to that the third largest PR Company that became the foundation Company for Ogilvy PR. Today he writes about technology and the impact on both business and consumers.